Founded in 1978 by Southland golf icon Eddie Merrins and philanthropist John Anderson, the Friends of Golf organization has grown to being one of the most potent proponents of the game’s future.

When Merrins, then the UCLA men’s golf coach and head professional at Bel-Air Country Club, and Bruins’ alumnus Anderson began Friends of Golf (FOG), the aim was to raise funds for the university’s golf program. But the decades since have seen the charitable endeavor soar with all the rise of a perfectly struck iron shot.

FOG’s first golf tournament, in 1980 at Bel-Air, raised $30,000 for UCLA’s golf program. In 2014, backed by hundreds of volunteers, the group raised nearly $750,000 for its ever-expanding reach of recipients.

“It’s evolved from this start-up which was designed to help UCLA attract and give scholarships to something much broader than that,” said Friends of Golf president John Hoffman. “It’s now a national footprint where we give to about 80 golf programs around the country. And we give almost as much money to high school and junior golf programs, mostly in Southern California but also around the country as well.”

The annual tournament has also served as a perpetual turnstile for honoring the game’s greatest names, such as Phil Mickelson, the most recent event honoree. Prior to Mickelson, FOG has also tipped its cap to the likes of Lee Trevino, Byron Nelson, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Sam Snead, Payne Stewart, Gary Player, Annika Sorenstam and Johnny Miller.

To date, FOG has raised more than $6 million for college, high school, junior and youth golf programs, and in 1990 the group established the Ben Hogan Award to honor college golf’s best male player. Four years later the group and the LPGA debuted the Dinah Shore Award to recognize the top woman in college golf, and in 2002 the Byron Nelson Trophy was introduced to recognize the academic golfer of the year.

Working as a major sponsor of the SCGA’s Youth on Course program, Friends of Golf has also become more active in promoting and helping the game’s younger generation.

“We really want to focus more of our efforts, as we grow, to getting more and more underprivileged kids the opportunity to play the game and learn all the values that the game offers,” Hoffman said. “Going forward, we want to make sure we do everything we can for these underserved kids and find ways to keep them on the golf course.”

With an avenue of opportunity, Hoffman sees those efforts as a way to possibly find the next Trevino, who rose from an impoverished childhood to be one of the top players in golf history.

“We can find some of these kids who come from nothing and get them the opportunity to play,” he said.

With a hands-on approach, FOG has seen the power of its philanthropy. While the tournament has regularly donated clubs to high schools through the California Interscholastic Federation’s Southern Section, an individual donor last year gave the organization 87 sets of new irons for distribution to young golfers.

“These clubs were still in the wrappers,” Hoffman said. “We had kids and their moms who took a bus from UCLA over to Venice High School where we were giving them away. And to give them a new set of clubs was to watch them break down and cry; the first time they’ve ever touched a new set of irons, no less had them. It was a very touching experience and an opportunity for us to help these kids who don’t have the means to buy clubs.”

Between modern concerns and past lore, the game, like a round, is about the next ball struck. And over the course of the past decade – with issues such as water shortages, participation concerns and course closures – golf has had a bad run of bad news. But FOG is counterpunching the pejorative and putting hope in the hands of the next generation.

“If we can do this in Southern California and do it well, I’m sure we can find ways to expand even further,” Hoffman said about working with youths in need of an opportunity. “And it will be for the good of golf. I think if we get these kids playing the game and learning the game, the more of that we get, we’re not only going to get better golfers but also people who do good things in the community because of what they learned through the game.”